Doing Our Bit With D&AD New Blood Shift

At Bulletproof, we believe it’s the individual strengths and differences of the people – our tribe – that make the difference.

In fact it’s one of our founding beliefs, and as a consequence, we prize diversity as a key ingredient in helping us deliver unrivalled creativity through impenetrable ideas.

So naturally we were thrilled to be working with D&AD this year supporting ‘New Blood Shift’, an initiative set up a year ago to help bring greater diversity to the creative industry.

This intensive night school programme has been created to help people with raw ability, yet no university degree or formal training, to apply their creative talents to advertising and design challenges.

So it was that Ed, Elissa and I swapped our strategy hats for tutors jackets in week number two of the D&AD New Blood Shift night-school.

We were speaking about Intelligent Naivety, another core belief that encourages us to always remain open-minded, relentlessly curious, seeking out new ways to solve problems creatively.

And this topic seemed fitting given our audience, as our premise is that experience can sometimes be a hindrance. To foresee new possibilities, people must have the ability to free themselves from preconceptions. So, in fact, naivety is a strength to capitalise on.

We champion Intelligent Naivety because it allows us to ask the pertinent questions, helping us to spot new and interesting opportunities. It also pushes us to get to bigger and braver thinking and encourages us to challenge the status quo.

We apply it to our thinking in five different ways:

ASK WHY – Get to the root cause of the brief, reframing the problem you’re trying to solve by continually asking why.

BEG, BORROW & STEAL: Seek inspiration from outside the category to challenge current conventions and push it forwards.

GET EMOTIONAL – Bring a fresh dynamic and emotion to a category, driving distinctiveness and ownability.

BREAK THE RULES – Change and define a different future by listing the rules, selecting which ones to break.

ASK ‘WHAT IF?’ – Go upstream and challenge the thinking by not accepting the prescribed rules and free yourself from existing restrictive conventions.

As we talked about Intelligent Naivety and worked through the different ways of applying this to the assigned brief, we could feel the energy rising in the room.

See, the wonderful thing about diversity is that it takes the ego out of the equation – and the focus becomes simply about creating great ideas.

It puts everyone on an equal level and creates a space where no idea is bad, and everyone is respected for their own unique perspective.

We wish everyone in the D&AD New Blood Shift class of 2017 the best of luck over the next few months and hope you found our class insightful.